When the Big Three  Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin  convened at this fabled Crimean seaside resort in 1945, the whole world was watching

The images are seared in our memory from World War II:
photographs of the Big Three seated together in a marble courtyard
at Yalta. As this uneasy alliance of leaders convened on the Black
Sea, they offered hope to a world ravaged by war. Later, the
so-called Yalta Conference was blamed for almost everything that
was to go wrong in the next half-century. But what happened at the
conference itself, argues frequent contributor Robert Wernick, did
not warrant this response.

It was a historic moment, to be sure, but little of note was
actually decided at Yalta. "Despite the persistent legends that
have grown up over the years," Wernick writes, "the Big Three of
Yalta did not divide Europe into East and West," and they "did not
divide Germany into zones of occupation." What they did do "was to
make promises of future cooperation and eternal amity," and vaguely
(and ultimately, ineffectively) ensure the rights of the nations of
Europe to self-determined, democratically elected governments.

Ironically, notes Wernick, at least some of the promises they
made, since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet
Union, have been realized. Yalta itself  once part of Russia, then
handed over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic  finally
became, in 1991, part of the newly independent republic of
Ukraine.

Wernick takes us on a guided tour of Yalta through the years 
to Livadia Palace, the dream house built by Czar Nicholas II that
became the site of the Yalta Conference; to the inner workings of
the conference itself; through the postwar years; and finally to
what, today, remains a splendid, though unpolished, jewel on the
Black Sea.